Biff Got the Almanac. We Got the Timeline.

Marty doesn't win that movie by punching Biff. He wins it by taking the book back.

I have written about surveillance architecture, about a captured campaign finance system, about the slow conversion of owning into renting. I have tried very hard, every time, to describe architecture instead of villains. In the grill brush piece six weeks ago I had a chance to name a company that had starved a supplier out of the market, and I refused, because I could not confirm it and I am not going to guess at a real company's identity in print.

So understand that this post is a departure, and that I know it.

Today I am going to use a villain. I am going to use a fictional one, on purpose, because I think the fiction is load-bearing, and I am going to hold every factual claim underneath it to the same standard I always do. Hot analogy. Cold evidence. If you only trust one half of that, trust the second half. The links are all at the bottom.

The source that set me off: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, “Trump & the DOJ”, S13E20, aired August 9, 2026.

First, the Receipt, Including the Part That Complicates It

On October 21, 2015, Back to the Future Day, The Daily Beast asked Bob Gale, who co-wrote Part II, whether Biff Tannen had been based on Donald Trump. Gale's answer:

“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding? You watch Part II again and there's a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there's a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there's one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”

Now here is the part most people posting that quote leave out, and I am not going to, because leaving it out is exactly the move I spend my professional life telling people not to fall for.

Snopes rates that claim a “mixture,” and the reasons are good ones. In July 2015, three months earlier, Gale told a CNN Q&A that Tannen and McFly were “archetypes.” The character was named after a Universal executive, Ned Tanen, who had been rude to Gale and Robert Zemeckis in a script meeting years before. And in 1985 Trump was a regional real estate guy, not a national archetype of anything. Gale himself later trimmed the claim: “Biff in the first movie is not based on Donald Trump; Biff is just an archetype bully. When Biff owns a casino, there was a Trump influence in that, absolutely.”

So the honest version is narrower than the meme, and it is also exactly the version I need. Nobody is claiming a 1985 prophecy. What Gale has consistently affirmed is that the 1985A Biff, the casino Biff, the one with his name on the tower and his own museum, had Trump in him. That is the timeline I want to talk about. Verify it yourself before you repeat it. That is always the rule here.

The Almanac Was Never About Money

Here is what everybody gets wrong about that movie.

Biff Tannen is not a criminal mastermind. He is not even particularly bright. Across three films he is out-thought by a teenager on a skateboard. His one and only advantage is that for a stretch of years he possessed a book that told him how things would turn out before they happened. Take the almanac away and he is a guy who waxes cars badly.

The almanac is not money. The almanac is certainty. It is the elimination of the gap between “we will run the process” and “we know how the process ends.” Everything downstream, the casino, the tower, the police in his pocket, the museum with his own face in it, is just what a mediocre man buys once outcomes stop being uncertain.

I have spent nearly 30 years in security. There is a name for what the almanac does to a system, and it is not corruption. It is integrity failure. Confidentiality is whether the wrong people can read it. Availability is whether it's up. Integrity is whether the output can be trusted to reflect the input. A system with an integrity failure does not stop running. It runs beautifully. It just produces the answer someone already picked.

Which brings me to the single most alarming sentence I read while sourcing this piece. In December 2025, more than 200 former attorneys of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division signed an open letter warning of the “near destruction” of the division, and describing a culture in which staff were “demanded to find facts to fit the Administration's predetermined outcomes.”

Read that again. That is not a metaphor I am imposing on the situation from the outside. That is two hundred career civil rights lawyers describing an almanac. Facts retrofitted to a known ending.

1985A Still Has a Courthouse

The thing people misremember about Hill Valley 1985A is that they remember it as chaos. It isn't. Watch it again. The town still has institutions. There is a courthouse. There is a police force. There is a newspaper. There is a museum, publicly celebrating Biff as “America's greatest living folk hero.” None of it is missing. All of it has simply been repointed at one man's interests, and everyone has adjusted.

That is the part that maps, and it maps hard.

The Justice Department still exists. Its lawyers still stand up in court and say the words a former DOJ official quoted to Oliver, that they represent not a client but “the United States and all of its people.” Obama reportedly told his first class of U.S. attorneys: “I appointed you, but you don't serve me. You serve the American people.” The letterhead is unchanged. The oath is unchanged.

What changed is who is left to mean it.

• The DOJ had 12,955 attorneys on December 31, 2024. Roughly 3,400 left between January 2025 and January 2026, about 21% of its lawyers gone in sixteen months. (Oliver put the current number nearer 4,000; his figure is more recent than the dataset I could independently confirm, so I'm using the smaller, verifiable one. It is bad enough.)
• Across the whole federal government, OPM data shows 8,599 licensed attorneys left between the inauguration and November 2025, a net loss of 6,524, the second-largest annual drop in federal attorney staffing since 2005.
• To backfill, DOJ waived the requirement that new federal prosecutors have even one year of experience practicing law, citing an “exigent hiring need.” Postings in Minnesota, South Florida, Montana, Alaska and Louisiana now ask for a law degree and an active bar card. That's it. You can prosecute federal crimes on behalf of the United States without ever having tried a case.
• And the Civil Rights Division, the one created during the civil rights era, the one people at Justice call the crown jewel, has seen 75% of its staff leave or be forced out.

Doc Brown, in 1985A, is not dead. He is committed. The people who understood how the machine worked were removed first, and the machine kept humming.

It is worth noting who is running it now, because the churn itself is the tell. Pam Bondi was fired on April 2, 2026, reportedly for not pursuing the president's priorities aggressively enough, and over her handling of the Epstein files. Todd Blanche, the president's former personal defense attorney, stepped in as acting AG and was confirmed to the job outright on August 8. The complaint was never that the department had gone too far. It was that it hadn't gone far enough, fast enough.

Where the Brutality Actually Lives

Here is the part I want you to sit with, because it is not the funny part and it is not the loud part.

Lowndes County, Alabama. Nearly three-quarters Black. Nearly a third below the poverty line. The soil is dense clay that ordinary septic systems cannot handle, and a system that does work can cost as much as a household there earns in a year. An 18-month federal investigation found that as many as 80% of residents lacked reliable sewage service. When it rains, raw sewage comes back up into people's homes. And under state law, residents could be fined or criminally charged for failing to install the systems they could not afford.

In 2023 the Civil Rights Division reached an agreement with the Alabama Department of Public Health: stop penalizing people for being poor, and help build an actual plan to fix it.

In April 2025, the Trump DOJ terminated that agreement. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon's stated reason: “The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens.”

I want to be precise about how proud they were of this, because you do not have to take a comedian's word for it or mine. The Justice Department's own press release is titled: “Department of Justice Terminates Environmental Justice Settlement Agreement, Advancing President Trump's Mandate to End Illegal DEI and Environmental Justice Policies.” That is the government of the United States issuing a press release to announce that it has stopped helping poor Black families in Alabama get sewage out of their yards, and framing it as a win.

Rep. Terri Sewell's response: “This agreement had nothing to do with DEI. It was about addressing a public health crisis that has forced generations of children and families to endure the health hazards of living in proximity to raw sewage, as the DOJ itself documented.”

As the DOJ itself documented. The findings didn't change. The almanac did.

And Lowndes is not an outlier, it's a sample. ProPublica found the DOJ closed more than 23,000 criminal investigations in the first six months of the second term, terrorism, white-collar fraud, drugs, while pivoting resources to immigration. In February 2025 alone, nearly 11,000 declinations, the most in a single month since at least 2004. Among the things quietly dropped: a probe into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse, fraud investigations involving several New Jersey labor unions, and a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating its investors.

Nobody made a video about those. There was no press conference. That is the whole point. The spectacle is upstream of the silence, and the silence is where the damage is.

And then there is the one I could not stop reading about once I found it.

On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old United States citizen, on a street in Minneapolis. Under every recent administration of either party, a fatal shooting by a federal officer triggers a DOJ civil rights review more or less automatically, even when everyone involved expects no charges at the end of it. The review is the point. It is how a government demonstrates that the question was asked.

The Civil Rights Division declined to open one. More than a dozen federal prosecutors in Minneapolis and Washington resigned in protest. The FBI agent who had opened the civil rights investigation resigned too. Senators Whitehouse and Durbin have demanded an inquiry into who blocked it.

That is what an almanac looks like when it touches a body. Not a rigged verdict, a refusal to run the process at all, because the answer was already known and writing it down would have been inconvenient.

The Sandwich Was the Distraction. It Was Also the Tell.

One year ago today, August 10, 2025, a man named Sean Dunn threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent near U Street in Washington, D.C. Dunn was 37, an Air Force veteran, and a former Justice Department paralegal.

He offered to turn himself in. Instead, roughly twenty officers staged a militarized raid on his apartment, and the White House released a produced video of it. Timestamps on the footage: 11:13 to 11:21. Eight minutes to arrest a man for something children do at recess, in a neighborhood between the Spanish embassy and the Ritz.

Then the process actually ran.

A federal grand jury, a body that indicts more than 99% of the time, the origin of the old line about indicting a ham sandwich, refused to indict him. Pirro's office downgraded to a misdemeanor. At trial, the agent testified the sandwich “kind of exploded all over” and that he could feel it through his ballistic vest. The defense played video showing the sandwich intact inside its wrapper. Dunn was acquitted of everything.

I do not think the sandwich is the story. I think the sandwich is the museum, the loud, self-celebrating, dumb-as-hell public monument that tells you exactly what the regime wants credit for, while the real work happens off-camera in Lowndes County.

But it is also the tell. Because a competent authoritarianism does not lose the sandwich case.

Where the Movie Is Wrong About Us

Here is my honest read, and it is the reason I could not write the doom version of this post.

In the movie, nobody stops Biff. Hill Valley 1985A has no functioning check. That is the fiction. And I want to name every place reality has refused to cooperate with the analogy, because a fury that ignores its own good news isn't fury, it's just despair wearing a costume:

• The Comey and Letitia James indictments were dismissed. Judge Cameron Currie found that the prosecutor who brought them, Lindsey Halligan, a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience, and the only prosecutor to present to the grand jury and sign the indictments, had been unlawfully appointed.
• The Broadview Six, Chicago ICE-facility protesters, including a congressional candidate, had all charges dismissed with prejudice, meaning they can never be refiled, after the U.S. Attorney personally acknowledged the lead prosecutor's mishandling of the grand jury. It had taken three grand jury sessions to get that indictment. The first came back a no bill.
• In Wyoming, three federal judges tossed felony indictments against nine defendants over misconduct by U.S. Attorney Darin Smith, who handed out his business cards to grand jurors on a break, called defendants “murderers,” and told them the cases were “slam dunks.” The judges: “This misconduct began with some of the first words spoken to the grand jury.”
• The voter-roll campaign is winless. The Civil Rights Division has sued states across the country demanding unredacted voter files including Social Security numbers and dates of birth. Democracy Docket's tracker had it at 0-for-18. Oliver said 21. The number keeps climbing because they keep filing and keep losing.

The guardrails held. Grand juries, trial juries, and district judges, ordinary people in rooms, and the judges who instruct them, did the work.

Now the part that keeps me from celebrating. The Comey and James dismissals were without prejudice, and DOJ is appealing. The nine Wyoming defendants were re-indicted by a new grand jury, the misconduct finding cost the government nothing. And Darin Smith? The Senate confirmed him as U.S. Attorney days after the “flagrant” misconduct finding. Todd Blanche, the president's former personal defense lawyer, was confirmed Attorney General 50 to 49 on August 8, with Bill Cassidy casting the deciding vote after publicly listing his own objections, including, in his words, being troubled by the department bringing suits against the president's perceived political enemies.

So: the courts are holding. The political layer above the courts is not holding at all. That is a very specific kind of danger, and it is not the one in the movie.

The Part That's Actually My Day Job

Strip the pop culture off and this is a trust-anchor problem, which is the thing I have spent my entire career on.

Every system that works at scale rests on something nobody re-verifies from scratch. In my world it's a root certificate authority. In the courts it's a doctrine called the presumption of regularity: judges start from the assumption that when the government says something, it did its job in good faith. Nobody audits it every time. That assumption is what makes the whole thing run at speed.

Federal judges are now revoking it in writing. ProPublica found more than 40 recent cases where judges felt the need to address it. Judge Paula Xinis, to government counsel: “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you've destroyed it.” Judge Mary McElroy, in a May 2026 ruling: the government “has proven unworthy of this trust at every point.” Another judge: “Trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”

That is a root CA compromise. And here is the thing every security person knows in their bones: you cannot patch a trust anchor. You can only replace it and re-verify everything downstream by hand, which is slow, expensive, and mostly doesn't happen. Trust is the one asset in any system that is cheap to spend and nearly impossible to re-earn.

Now let me argue against myself, because you should not take my nostalgia at face value.

There's a real case that the presumption of regularity was a bad idea to begin with, and Reason made it well last week. Law professor Carissa Hessick argues the doctrine sits on a “shaky foundation,” it mutated out of a mundane evidentiary tie-breaker about ledgers into “a reason to not make the government play by the same rules as other people.” Its most notable modern citation is U.S. v. Armstrong (1996), where the Supreme Court used it to deny Black defendants access to charging data that might have shown they were being selectively targeted on crack cocaine cases. Retired federal judge Liam O'Grady thinks the doctrine is “overstated in its importance” anyway, and that judges have always sized up prosecutors individually.

I think that's a serious argument and I'm not going to pretend it away. Maybe a judiciary that defaults to skepticism toward government lawyers is a better judiciary. If that's the world we end up in, some of the people it protects will be exactly the ones Armstrong failed.

But notice what that argument does and doesn't do. It says the presumption was overvalued. It does not say it is fine that it was destroyed on purpose, by an administration that needed it gone in order to get outcomes it had already chosen. A vulnerability being real doesn't make the exploit legitimate.

I Refuse to Leave You in the Dark

Same split as always. Do not confuse these two categories.

The levee, what we should be demanding:

• Experience requirements for federal prosecutors, restored and statutory. A law degree and a bar card is not a qualification to take away a human being's liberty. Put it in statute so it cannot be waived by memo.
• Consequences that attach to individuals. The Wyoming misconduct finding cost the government one grand jury cycle and cost the prosecutor a Senate confirmation vote in his favor. Bar referrals and sanctions have to be real, or misconduct is just a scheduling delay.
• Fund and rebuild the Civil Rights Division. Losing 75% of a division is not a reorganization, it is a demolition, and rebuilding it will outlast whoever is president.
• Protect the grand jury. Transcript access, real remedies for prosecutorial vouching, and no do-overs that let the government shop for a friendlier panel.

The sandbags, what you can do this month:

• If you get a jury summons, go. I am not being cute. In this timeline, the thing that stopped the sandwich prosecution, the Broadview Six prosecution, and the Wyoming indictments was ordinary people in a room refusing to rubber-stamp. That is the functioning guardrail. It only functions if people show up.
• Learn what your state AG is doing. Half the wins above came from states declining to hand over voter files.
• Read the primary document. The DOJ press release about Lowndes County is public. It says what it says under its own letterhead. You do not need a pundit between you and it.
• Support the people who report this. ProPublica found the 23,000. Democracy Docket counted the losses. None of that came from a press conference.

The sandbags help you sleep. They do not rebuild the levee. Only organized people do that.

Why I'm Telling You This

I have a specific reason to care whether the law means the same thing on both sides of a state line, and it is not abstract.

I am a 50-year-old man with a fused spine who filed Chapter 7 on October 15, 2025. I manage chronic pain with medical cannabis. I live and travel full-time in a truck and a trailer. Which means my legal status changes depending on which side of a border I am parked on, and federal law has an opinion about me that my body disagrees with. I wrote about that in March and I meant every word of it.

So when I watch a Justice Department decide that its findings about raw sewage in Lowndes County were true in 2023 and inoperative in 2025, same facts, same clay soil, same children, I am not watching an abstraction. I am watching the thing I depend on most: that the rule is the rule regardless of who is asking. Take that away and a guy like me isn't governed by law anymore. He's governed by whoever currently holds the book.

That is the whole horror of 1985A, and it has nothing to do with Biff being cruel. Cruelty is loud and stupid and it loses the sandwich case. The horror is that the outcome was decided before the process ran, and the process ran anyway, in a building with the right name on it.

But Marty doesn't win that movie by punching Biff. He never lays a hand on him. He wins by getting the book back, by removing the instrument that made the outcomes certain. That's the whole plot. The bully was always survivable. The certainty was not.

Show up for jury duty. Get loud with me.

Sources & Further Reading

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: “Trump & the DOJ”, S13E20, aired August 9, 2026, the segment that prompted this post. Coverage: Deadline, The A.V. Club.
• The Daily Beast (Oct. 21, 2015): “‘Back to the Future’ Writer: Biff Tannen Is Based on Donald Trump”, the Gale quote. Read alongside Snopes' “mixture” rating and Gale's later walk-back. I quoted all three on purpose.
• ProPublica: “Trump's Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration” (Mar. 31, 2026), the declinations, the nursing home, the crypto case, the ~11,000-case February.
• ProPublica: “Federal Judges Criticize Trump's Justice Department for ‘Unethical’ Conduct”, the 40+ cases on the presumption of regularity.
• Reason (Aug. 6, 2026): “Courts Say the Justice Department Is Shredding the ‘Presumption of Regularity.’ It Never Deserved Extra Trust.” This is the strongest argument against my own framing. Hessick on the doctrine's shaky foundation, U.S. v. Armstrong, and Judge O'Grady's dissent from the panic. Read it.
• U.S. Department of Justice: “Department of Justice Terminates Environmental Justice Settlement Agreement…”, the Lowndes County termination, in the government's own words, with the Dhillon quote.
• Inside Climate News: “Trump Announces ‘Termination’ of ‘Illegal DEI’ Settlement Over Raw Sewage”; Equal Justice Initiative background on Lowndes County; Rep. Terri Sewell's statement.
• On the killing of Renee Good: Al Jazeera; Fox News (worth reading the coverage from outlets sympathetic to the administration on this one); KARE 11 on the FBI agent's resignation; Sens. Whitehouse and Durbin's demand for an inquiry; Just Security's legal analysis.
• CBS News / Forbes: Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general, installs Todd Blanche as acting AG (April 2, 2026).
• American Bar Association: “Justice Department struggles as thousands exit, and few are replaced”, attorney attrition and backfill failure.
• Bloomberg Law / ABA Journal: DOJ waiving the one-year practice requirement for new prosecutors; ABA Journal.
• NBC News / CNN: Judge dismisses the Comey and Letitia James indictments over Halligan's unlawful appointment.
• NBC News / The Hill: Grand jury declines to indict Sean Dunn; Dunn acquitted.
• Chicago Sun-Times / CBS Chicago: “Broadview Six” charges dropped over prosecutorial misconduct; grand jury transcript.
• Cowboy State Daily / Bloomberg Law: Wyoming indictments tossed over U.S. Attorney Darin Smith's misconduct; Senate confirms Smith days later; new grand jury re-indicts the nine.
• Democracy Docket: the running tally of DOJ voter-roll losses.
• NPR / Washington Post: Senate confirms Todd Blanche as Attorney General, 50 to 49; Cassidy on his deciding vote.
• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: the December 2025 open letter from 200+ former Civil Rights Division attorneys, source of the “find facts to fit the Administration's predetermined outcomes” quote.

Sourcing note: Oliver's segment is where I started, not where I stopped. Every hard number here was independently confirmed against ProPublica, OPM data via the ABA, Bloomberg Law, court reporting, or the government's own press releases before publication. Where my figure is smaller than his, the attorney departures, I used the smaller one I could verify and said so. Where the count is a moving target, the voter-roll losses, I said that too. Where the strongest argument cuts against my own framing, I linked it and gave it a section. The Bob Gale quote is real and disputed, and I gave you both. Verify anything you plan to repeat.

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Casey writes about economic policy, nomadic life, cybersecurity, and navigating the world as a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult. New posts drop on my professional website.